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Comment by Kuraj | Hacker News Reader

> A number of responses say "have the client detect that it's running an old version and force reload." That works, but it's pretty annoying UX.

Is it though? Of all reasons to force refresh, this sounds reasonable to me as it won't even happen that often.

Heck, I would want to refresh if I knew a new version was available.

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  Is it though?

Depends if you're triggering it six times a year or six times a day. Some companies pride themselves on how often they deploy code to production [1].

And whether your SPA is something like Google Docs where a user could plausibly have the same document open for a week or more.

[1] https://blog.newrelic.com/technology/data-culture-survey-res...

Is it common to be releasing breaking API schema changes 6 times a day?

Intentionally? Probably not.

No, but it's common to underestimate the cost imposed on clients how avoidable a breaking change is.

I'm not sure if that's a good example. Google Docs automatically saves the document when there's a change, so you won't loose any work if you refresh.

I may be misremembering but I actually remember GDocs telling me to reload once, so presumably they have some way of forcing reloading if they need it (I think it let me keep working locally until I reloaded, then all my stuff would be saved and synced like normal).

make it silent? like chrome update?

silent download and auto install on next startup

Even Facebook does this when you have left it open in a tab for too long.

[edit]: spellcheck failed.

> Even Facebook

Like they're the example we should look to. They do all sorts of hacky stuff.

I lol'd, Facebook has a terrible UI on every platform.

They do lots of stuff, but they don't seem to break their user's usage due to reloading if you leave a window open forever.

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